Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

Parashat B'ha·alot'kha
Numbers 8:1-12:16
June 8, 1996 11 Sivan 5756

Ismar Schorsch is the chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary.

The nation Moses brought out of Egypt shared neither his
vision nor faith. Miracles did not quash its murmuring against
him. The Rabbis tally up some ten incidents following the
Exodus in which the Israelites bitterly contested God's will and
Moses's leadership. Fear of the future even diluted their
recollection of past suffering; the perceived security of slavery
was preferable to the risks of freedom. Popular unrest soon
reversed any prospect of a quick journey to the Promised
Land.

Thus the Torah picks up the narrative this week with Moses
inviting his father–in–law to join Israel on its march to Canaan:
"We are setting out for the place of which the Lord has said,
I will give it to you.' Come with us and we will be generous
with you; for the Lord has promised to be generous to Israel
(Numbers 10:29)." Led by the Ark of the Covenant and
protected by the Lord's cloud which hovered above them, the
people stood ready to cross the wilderness.

But adversity soon found them wanting. No matter how pure
and sacred, their encampment was hardly a five–star hotel.
"The people took to complaining bitterly before the Lord
(Numbers 11:1)." And immediately after that brief episode,
we are treated to another with more specificity. "The riffraff
in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites
wept and said, If only we had meat to eat (Numbers 11:4)!'"

This second episode turns out to be in ugly protest against an
unrelieved diet of manna. In the process, the instigators
would have us believe that in Egypt as slaves they enjoyed a
varied and plentiful diet of fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks,
onions and garlic. "Now our gullets are shriveled. There is
nothing at all! Nothing but this manna to look to (Numbers
11:6)!"

How quickly do new hardships erode the memory of earlier
ones! The austerity of freedom is more unbearable than its
absence. Egyptian bondage could never have been as
discomforting as the self–reliance needed to survive the
wilderness. Unhinged by fear, we lose sight of the future and
reinvent the past.

The Rabbis had difficulty imagining that the eruption of such
resistance to Moses was motivated by material concerns.
They posited a deeper dynamic. The demand for meat was a
pretext masking repudiation of God. The divine regimen
which came with freedom, which alone could invest it with
purpose, nobility and meaning, was simply too taxing. The
"riffraff" did not come from outside Israel; they were not the
Egyptians who had attached themselves to Israel in its hour of
triumph. Far worse, they were Israel's elders and leaders, and
if they deemed it necessary to abandon the vision of Moses
and to return to the "fleshpots" of Egypt (Exodus 16:3), then
surely this was a view shared fully by the masses. The
uprising was not a detour dictated by foreign elements but a
groundswell. Moses's stewardship hung in the balance
because eventually a people gets the leadership it deserves.
The lesson of the Torah is that miracles don't change human
nature. They may set it aside for a time, but it will come back
to prevail in all its frustrating intractability. The children of
Israel had been born and bred in slavery. Miracles would not
strip them overnight of their slave mentality. It went with
them into freedom and reasserted itself in the face of the
slightest hardship. Only time and testing would gradually
erase the timidity imprinted in their hearts. Or in the sober
words of Maimonides: "A sudden transition from one opposite
to another is impossible. And therefore man, according to his
nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which he
was accustomed."

It is for this reason that the Torah settled for a sacrificial
system not unlike that to be found throughout the pagan
world. Maimonides believed that the Tabernacle and Temple
were not an end in themselves, but merely a step toward a
more spiritual form of worship. Emerging out of the matrix of
the ancient Near East, Israel could rise no higher than a temple
cult, albeit one redirected to the worship of a single, supreme
being.

Similarly, Maimonides observed, a nation just freed from long
bondage lacked the resolve to defend its freedom. The Torah
goes out of its way to stress that as the Israelites left Egypt,
they did not take the most direct route to Canaan: "Now when
Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of
the land of the Philistines, although it was nearer; for God
said, The people may have a change of heart when they see
war, and return to Egypt (Exodus 13:17).'" The Philistines
were a bellicose nation, and Israel was not yet ready for
military battle.

And when the ultimate test came (in next week's parasha),
Israel failed it. The courage and conviction to take the land by
conquest, to move beyond its state of utter dependence on
divine interference was still missing. The dismal report of the
ten spies who scouted the Promised Land flowed not from
what they saw but how they felt. On seeing the large size of
its inhabitants, they declared lamentably, "We looked like
grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to
them (Numbers 13:33)." Their mental state determined what
they were capable of taking in.

Redemption alone could not turn abject slaves into fighters for
freedom. Reluctantly, God concluded that the generation of
the Exodus had to be allowed to perish in the wilderness.
Only a nation reared in freedom would take the risks needed
to secure it permanently.

Alas, there are no shortcuts in history. A self–limiting God
does not make things easy for us. The scars of past
experience will not be wiped away benevolently. Outgrow
them we must, but on our own, through constant struggle and
setbacks. We are fated to be the clumsy masters of our
recalcitrant souls. While God is ready to strengthen our
resolve, progress does not spring from miracles.